Exclusivity and direct access to exclusive products will be critical issues for the future of the retail industry. So it' s interesting to see that French catalogue retailer 3 Suisses launches Upfactory, an online marketplace for aspiring (fashion) designers.
Although completely in French there is an English description of the platform in the blog of the French consulting firm faberNovel:
"Four weeks ago, the fashion platform UpFactory was released and already there are over 130 creators and 1200 products for sale on the site and these numbers are increasing.
So what makes this ‘Social Shopping Website’ different? The site was developed for 3 Suisses, the large mail order catalogue company, in order to directly involve them in the current global dialogue about shopping.
The site is currently up and away in France, but it is expected to expand into Europe very soon."
"There are sites such as shopstyle.com and stylehive.com where you interact about fashion/clothes/shopping. However, the main problem with having sites like this is that while they are social, it is necessary to go to an additional site in order to purchase a product.
At the other end of things, there are sites where you can go to buy and sell products, the most obvious example of this is ebay, but it is not possible to interact on a site such as this…so UpFactory has made its home in the niche between these too markets and done so in a way that is innovative in both format and function."
Further details in the blog from faberNovel.
It will be interesting to see, if Upfactory can catch on. The site suffers a little bit from “Osoyou” syndrome. The home page in particular seems overloaded and somewhat hard to navigate. But time will reveal how it develops.
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.
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